I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

When radium was discovered, no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it.

Poetry, fiction as novels or short stories - these are autonomous as created by their authors. They should stand on their own, like pieces of furniture that should be judged as to their usefulness, elegance.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be, according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.

[I pray] that we might not outlive our usefulness.

Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

A person's worth is quite independent of their usefulness to society.

In such an environment I was able to study things that could be of immediate usefulness to the world. That learning experience undoubtedly served me well when I eventually entered the work force.

We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have - for their usefulness.

There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry simplicity and generality and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things creative mathematicians now as in the past are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be according to the fitness and tendency of things. Nature has set upon him the process of decline and dissolution by which she removes things which have survived their usefulness.

The need to write comes from the need to make sense of one's life and discover one's usefulness.